Ranger tracks the lives of Georgia's painted buntings

Tuesday

Peter Range was still positioning the mist nets at his Wassaw Island banding station when a young painted bunting entangled itself in the webbing.

And before he could finish fitting that tiny bird with its I.D. anklet, three more buntings crash landed in the nets.

Blame their over-eagerness on the lure of an irresistible treat inside the mist net.

"White millet is like bunting cocaine," said Range, a ranger with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "They love white millet."

Range stays on the 10,000-acre refuge one or two days a week from April through September, banding buntings among other chores. His work here since 1999 banding close to 1,200 painted buntings has given him amazing insight about particular birds, the local population and buntings in general.

Banding 101

Range removed each bird from the net and eased it into a mesh bag that once held oranges. His helper for the day, Monica Harris, the visitor services manager for the Savannah Coastal Refuges complex, held the bagged birds as Range got to work.

For each bunting he recorded its sex, if known, and estimated its age based on criteria such as its feather pattern, the thickness of its skull and how much fat it had stored. Males don't achieve their spectacular adult plumage - blue head, red breast and green back - until age 3.

The first bird was a hatch year bunting, as were all the catches that day. Most adults have already flown south to south Florida, Cuba or Mexico for their winter vacation.

Range usually gives each bird a two-colored ankle bracelet that identifies the year it was banded, but this year's bands are on back-order, having never arrived from the supplier in England.

So with its aluminum band squeezed gently into place, Range released the newly numbered 203193742 just outside the screened porch where he works.

It took no time getting gone.

An old bird returns

Range has been banding birds since he was 13, when a neighbor in his East Tennessee hometown took him under his wing, so to speak.

At the banding station a local college professor had set up they captured an evening grosbeak, a large black and yellow finch, that records showed had been banded in Lincoln, Maine.

"I was hooked ever since," he said.

It's that individuality bestowed by banding that makes it both satisfying emotionally and valuable scientifically, said Tim Keyes, a wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

"The amount you can learn from re-sightings is tremendous," he said.

Banding, in fact, allowed Range to reacquaint himself with a record-setter. Earlier this summer he captured an already-banded female.

"I'd banded her as a 3-year-old," he said. "That made her 11 years old. That's the oldest known bunting in North America. I kid that she had a bottle of Geritol tucked under her wing."

A few years ago he noticed a painted bunting feeding at his backyard feeder in Richmond Hill, about 15 miles from Wassaw as the bunting flies. Pulling out his spotting scope he read off the bird's band number. That bird, it turned out, was one he had banded just two weeks before on Wassaw.

The chances of such an encounter are close to nil, Range said.

Beautiful and getting rarer

Range's work has documented a slight decline in the numbers of painted buntings on Wassaw, where the thickets of shrubs and scrubs are perfectly to the birds' liking.

He figures coastal development on the mainland is partly to blame for the bird's decline.

"Every time you build a house you clear the yard and (that habitat) is gone," he said.

In some places where the birds winter, such as Cuba, the stunning males are caught for the caged bird trade.

"The two things combined are putting a whammy on them," he said.

A decline of about 3.5 percent to 5 percent per year in painted bunting numbers has been documented by larger studies on the mainland, though there's some new evidence that situation might be better than previously believed, Keyes said. Researchers using a new survey method are finding more birds than they did previously, with that research scheduled for publication early next year.

Still, the International Union of Concerned Scientists lists painted buntings as "near threatened" and they're a species of concern for the international public/private cooperative effort Partners in Flight. Along with the East Coast population, another population exists in the south central states.

Range said Coastal Georgia is the epicenter of painted buntings in the East. They're densely populated here. Anyone with a yard can help support them by keeping areas of their property more natural and thicket-like with native shrubs such as waxed myrtle.

"These birds deserve a better chance than they're getting," Range said. "As a society we should help preserve these birds. They have nowhere else to go."

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.